Alec Baldwin kicked off the new season of “SNL” with a Trump sketch, and he had A LOT of ground to cover
Is it just us, or has this first summer (it hasn’t even been a year!) in Trump’s America felt excruciatingly endless? From Trump’s firing of James Comey (and Reince Priebus, and Anthony Scaramucci, and Steve Bannon, and…) to Robert Mueller’s Russia probe to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville to threatening nuclear war with North Korea to POTUS’s positively unhinged tweets to his despicable travel ban to his even more despicable transgender ban to OH MY GOD, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!
In other words, we need to laugh. Like, yesterday. So, when SNL kicked off its new season last night with a sketch starring Alec Baldwin as Trump and poked fun of at all the drama, all we could do was LOL.
Well, not all of the drama.
The sketch is only 5 minutes and 46 seconds long, after all. But SNL did its best to catch us up on the chaos around Trump’s feud with Jeff Sessions (played by the always hilarious Kate McKinnon), White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ clumsy handling of the NFL’s national anthem protest (a spot-on performance by Aidy Bryant), and Chuck Schumer’s mysterious “secret deal” he is said to be working on with POTUS.
"I might look adorable, but I'm frightening." --Kate McKinnon as Jeff Sessions#SNLPremiere #SNL @nbcsnl pic.twitter.com/ZcddkKurXX
— Victoria Brownworth (@VABVOX) October 1, 2017
But it was the cold open’s skewering of Trump’s dismissive response to the desperate conditions in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria — an event that continues to unfold in real time — that really hit home. In the sketch, Trump, fresh from a round of golf, receives a phone call from San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz (played by Melissa Villaseñor).
“I was expecting this phone call. I’m sure she wants to tell me what a great job I’m doing,” says Baldwin as Trump.
SNL is back, they're meta to the minute, and I'm here for it.#SNLPremiere pic.twitter.com/CfsjG7rH85
— BrooklynDad_Defiant! (@mmpadellan) October 1, 2017
Of course, when Villaseñor’s Cruz asks for the president’s help in securing aid for the people of Puerto Rico, Baldwin as Trump is just as clueless, inadvertently revealing he doesn’t know PR’s status as a U.S. territory.
“It’s a big ocean, water, with fishies and bubbles and turtles that bite,” he says. “We want to help you, but we have to take care of America first.”
